Travel often brings the unexpected. But I was unprepared to find some of the best food I've ever eaten in Australia. On a recent trip, we stopped at a café for lunch. An Australian woman we had seen earlier at a sheep dairy ran over and recommended the marron salad. "What is marron?" I asked. "Well," she said, "you know what yabbies are." Toto, we're not in Kansas any more. We are in Oz — which is what the locals call Australia. And bad British food is no longer the norm. Marron and yabbies look kind of like crawfish, in case you were wondering. At the amazing Sydney Fish Market they sit side-by-side with all kinds of seafood I've never heard of: Balmain bugs , blue-spotted goatfish , mud crabs and the impossibly delicious barramundi. One of every four Australians is from somewhere else. This on a continent with fewer people than California. And most people live on the coast, so they eat a lot of fresh fish. Aboriginal people lived here as hunter-gatherers for about 40,000 years before
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